The customer journey, representing each and every touchpoint a customer encounters over their lifetime of experience with a brand, is expressed in a customer journey map. These maps can become quite complex based on the nature of the product or service and the extent to which a customer engages with it and the people and institutions connected with it. That complexity is nothing compared to the employee journey (also expressed in an employee journey map). Think about it: If the company is the one that made your car, you probably engage with that company multiple times each day. You connect every time you get behind the wheel, every time your car needs repairs, whenever you enhance the vehicle (custom paint, for instance, or a new entertainment system), every time you take it in for service, even when you get together with other owners of that model.

Yet an employee touches the company every day, from the moment they walk through the door to the time they head home. Every moment they are at work contributes to the employee experience, as do many of the hours spent away from work (taking a paid day to volunteer in the community or, conversely, when getting medical care and realizing their health plan doesn’t cover a huge chunk of the cost). Every support call to IT, every interaction with HR, every delayed supply requisition, every contentious performance review, every positive message from leadership, even the comfort (or lack thereof) of their workplace desk and chair contributes to their perception of the company, a perception they carry into their interactions with colleagues, their broader professional community, friends, family, vendors, new hires, the list goes on (and on and on).

In this installment, we’ll dive deeper into the ways employee communicators can support a great employee journey.

This is the latest installment in a series of posts exploring a new model of employee communication, designed to deliver measurable results that demonstrate the impact on the organization in ways that matter to leaders.

The series:
Part 1: Introduction	Part 13: Place
Part 2: Overview	Part 14: Engagement
Part 3: Alignment	Part 15: The Strategic Narragive
Part 4: Listening	Part 16: Engaging Managers
Part 5: Consultation	Part 17: Employee Voice
Part 6: Branding	Part 18: Organizational Integrity
Part 7: Channels	Part 19: The Customer Experience
Part 8: Culture	Part 20: The Customer Journey
Part 9: Vision/Mission	Part 21: Touchpoints on the Customer Journey
Part 10: Values	Part 22: Customer Ecosystems
Part 11: Practices	Part 23: The Employee Experience
Part 12: People

The four overlapping circles at the center of the model represent the best opportunities for employee communication to affect an organization on a day-to-day basis. This post explores the first element of the Employee Experience, the employee journey(EX).

The task of mapping the employee journey mapping usually falls to Human Resources. Because the map correlates to Employee Experience (EX), which is most often an HR responsibility, HR creates the map (or, as we’ll see, more than one) in order “to understand the moments that matter most to employees, how these impact the experience, and what (the company) can do at each stage to have a positive impact on metrics like engagement, attrition, and productivity,” writes Steve Bennetts in an HR Exchange post, How journey mapping improves your employee experience.

Most companies create a single map based on the elements of the journey all employees share in common. Generally, these include the following:

• Recruitment
• Hiring
• Onboarding
• Employee changes (e.g., promotions, transfers, changes to benefits)
• Offboarding

This highlights approach to employee journey mapping is woefully inadequate. It fails to capture all the moments that can make or break (or, at least, greatly influence) the employee experience. Missing from this 50,000-foot style of mapping are stops on the journey that include things like career development, engagement in change initiatives, daily interactions with support teams (like IT, Legal, Finance, and HR), key social activities (like the company picnic and the holiday party), community engagement (like a companywide or departmental day of service), recognition, and relationships with supervisors.

Even if you add every general signpost for a generic employee journey, you will still come up short. Just as marketers develop multiple personas for customer journey maps, organizations need to develop distinct personas for employees. After all, the journey of a sales representative who meets with customers all day and only occasionally visits the office will bear only scant resemblance to that of a shipping-and-receiving staff member who spends their days on and around a loading dock. I work for a construction company: The journey of a business development staffer will be nothing like that of a project superintendent. It is vital that someone identify the key categories of employees in your organization and develop personas based on the common demographics (and other characteristics) of employees filling those positions.

Only in this way will the organization be able to pinpoint the moments that represent the most important stops on the journey for each persona.

And only then will employee communicators be able to target communication processes and messages to each persona at the right moment.

One Size Does Not Fit All

As I have noted before, internal communication has relied on mass media to reach employees. My first corporate job was with an energy company where, in the mid-1970s until long after I moved on nearly seven years later, was a weekly employee newspaper.  It was a great newspaper, earning a parade of recognition; it was the envy of the Los Angeles-area communication community. Every one of the 55,000 employees at this company got the newspaper. That is, every one of them got the same newspaper and not much else. Yes, it was a great way to keep everyone informed (especially in an era with no internet).

Would that newspaper get information to a pipeline engineer in their third year of employment who is just starting to feel disillusioned about their opportunities for advancement and the increasing sameness of their workdays? How about the real estate contracts analyst celebrating their 10th anniversary and wondering if there may be a different path? Or the vice president with 20 years experience and a wealth of knowledge who was just passed over for promotion? Or the systems engineer who just wrapped up a daunting project and is wondering what’s next?

Our cousins in marketing are making huge advances in personalized marketing, reaching customers based on their interactions (e.g., they just upgraded their product) and what the organization knows about them (e.g., they have been a customer for more than a decade). Employee communication is far behind this curve.

Of course, employee communication budgets are a fraction of the resources allocated to marketing. While we should be exploring was to adapt personalized, targeted communication technology to employees, there is much we can do to enhance the Employee Experience if we know the key stops on the journey. And there is much we can do to help identify what those stops are.

Assisting in the Mapping Process

Measurement is a big part of the two-way communication process. As we discussed earlier, measurement is also one of the primary ways communicators can give employees a voice (one of the pillars of employee engagement). Working with HR (or whoever is responsible for the mapping exercise), communicators can help correlate survey results and other employee feedback with stops on the journey.

Most internal comms surveys (or engagement surveys) include demographics. It should be a simple matter to find out what accounts for the lowest levels of satisfaction among, say, employees in the manufacturing business unit who have been with the company for 10-15 years. You can also come at it from a different angle: Knowing that employees are most likely to leave their jobs at about the three-year mark, you can analyze the data for all employees approaching three years of tenure to reveal their biggest issues.

In fact, there is no reason, if you know the most important stops on the journey, that you couldn’t solicit feedback from employees whose careers align with those stops. This does not have to match up to tenure. A survey or focus group about the just-concluded performance management process can tell you a lot about how employees feel about this unquestionably important step on the journey.

Another role for communicators might be the equivalent of a cartographer, establishing points on the map. Most employee journey maps begin with recruitment but should start earlier, just as customer journey maps do: with awareness of the organization as a prospective employer, then moving to consideration. Similarly, most employee journey maps end with “offboarding” and don’t consider the post-employment experience.

Once the most important parts of the journey have been established for each persona, and you’ve listed the key challenges and issues associated with those steps, you can begin weaving them into your communication plan.

Communicating to Improve the Experience

In the late 1980s, I had a consulting engagement with one of the big global HR consulting firms. The goal was to produce a presentation to clients that demonstrated how the firm was thinking ahead—10 years ahead, to be precise. One of the ideas I proposed married HR, communication, and technology. Here’s how it worked:

An employee with 10 years of experience has been in the same job for five years. She has been recognized for her contributions and has accumulated a few title advances (from specialist to assistant manager to manager) but is still working in the same office with the same people on the same projects she has been for half a decade. She has not indicated that she is getting itchy and thinking of leaving to do something new. But the data suggests that people in her situation quit at a higher rate than others. The HR Information System (HRIS) detects that she is in this category and kicks out a note that she is qualified to head up the launch of a new office or manufacturing facility in China. The company makes the offer, which satisfies her desire to do something new and exciting without leaving.

This scenario made it into the presentation. Unfortunately, it was not as prescient as I had thought. (If it were, this kind of system would have been routine by the late 1990s. It is not even routine today, nearly 35 years later.) You can imagine, though, how much of a positive impact this change of course might have had on this employee’s experience.

In the absence of systems that match employees’ locations on the journey with opportunities to improve their experience, how can communications fill the gap? Fortunately, there is no end to the possibilities.

• Use the list—Five paragraphs ago, I suggested that you list the key challenges and issues associated with the most momentous steps in the journeys of your company’s various employee personas. The list is a guide for content. It will be worthwhile to consider the list of stories you are already planning to tell. How can the article you’re writing about new markets the company is entering appeal to employees at the precarious three-year mark? How will a video detailing a new IT process affect the journey for an admin who relies on the system? If you’re writing an employee profile, can you include a reference to how taking advantage of learning and development opportunities helped propel that employee’s career or how a positive encounter with HR reinvigorated their commitment to the organization?
• Use the list to make content decisions—I have always used a matrix to make sure my team is delivering a balanced mix of content. The matrix I use (which I adapted freely from one I saw at an IABC conference session many, many years ago) uses color-coding, with each color representing a different content category (red might be company values, green stands for operations, etc.). To ensure we are covering employee journey issues, I would choose the four or five most important moments on the journey and represent them with unique colors. That way, I can be certain we are including relevant content throughout our channels each week.
• Tag your content—If you are working with an intranet CMS (like Simpplr, Staffbase, Igloo, SharePoint, or Unily), you most likely have the ability to tag each piece of content with topics such as Benefits, Community, Core Values, Innovation, Safety, Management, Learning and Development, and Diversity. Next, help employees get into the habit of subscribing to content that syncs up with their interests. At my company, there is a module on the intranet home page for stories that match the topics to which employees have subscribed and that those stories appear at the top of the home screen when employees open the mobile intranet app.
• Double down on the most important stops on the journey—If you know recognition is a vital milestone on the journey for most personas, you can help raise the bar on recognition and create a better experience. For existing recognition programs, make sure that recognition spreads far and wide throughout the organization. I worked for a company where recipients of the President’s Award were ushered into the president’s office one at a time where they were handed a certificate and a check; little was done to raise awareness of their achievements throughout the company, minimizing the gratification that came with the recognition. (My team changed that, making the President’s Award into a much bigger deal.) You can also create new recognition. On the revamped intranet home page we are about to launch, one of the most prominent modules is “High Fives,” where any employee can recognize any other employee for anything.
• Be an explainer—If employees are confused about a process—such as performance management—you can make it easier to understand. You can also collect employee feedback and suggest how the process can be improved to build greater support for it.
• Support the teams that influence the journey—Feedback reveals weaknesses in the Employee Experience. Knowing where employees encounter these weaknesses can help you support the organizational teams that manage the processes that underlie the less-than-ideal experiences employees encounter on their journeys. Does your internal communication or engagement survey show that managers are an obstacle to engagement? Further research may reveal that the one-on-ones managers have with their direct reports are not achieving their objectives. This should prompt a multichannel communication effort to improve one-on-ones. Of course, communication alone won’t fix a problem of this scale, so develop a partnership with HR and L&D to tackle it in a coordinated campaign. At the very least, notify department leaders if feedback indicates their teams are the source of dissatisfaction (like, for instance, if IT support requests aren’t being answered quickly enough or if HR representatives are acting condescending to lower-level employees).
• Communicate key milestones—Something as simple as an employee seeing his name on a list of service anniversaries on digital signage can add a lift to the journey.
• Support business unit leaders—Because the part of the business in which an employee spends their career is one of the most common criteria for a persona, employee communicators can offer to help the leaders of business units communicate more effectively to address weaknesses in the business unit’s journey.
• Emphasize neglected journey milestones—Not every milestone on the employee journey gets the level of attention it deserves. Consider employees who depart the organization (through termination, resignation, or retirement). How is the company handling those departures? Are you learning anything from exit interviews? Are you engaging employees after they leave? (The company where I work has an alumni LinkedIn group that our Talent Acquisition team leverages as part of its recruiting effort.) As for those who leave voluntarily, are your post-employment engagement efforts designed to encourage a potential return to the company?

This is by no means a comprehensive list; consider it more of a sampler of tactics you can incorporate into your strategy in order to improve the journey and elevate the Employee Experience. How you approach this will depend on the market sector you operate in, the nature of the journeys your maps reveal for each persona, the weaknesses feedback reveals, and the tools and channels available to you.

Up next

Daily interactions are part of the employee journey but may not rise to the level of a full-blown stop. I have never seen an employee journey map where an IT support interaction or a call from HR is called out. Those daily interactions can have an outsized impact on an employee’s overall experience, though. One irritating encounter with the VP of another division who belittles your idea or interferes with your plans can chip away at your level of engagement. In the next installment, we’ll explore how internal communicators can improve the day-to-day interactions employees experience throughout their journeys.

The graphics for this series were created by Brian O’Mara-Croft.